UCSF Seeking Patients for Medical Marijuana Research

goddaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamn I wish I lived in Cali

edit: wait, ...no, I don't have AIDS or Breast cancer unfortunately(j/k)

 

I've been suffering pain in my right eye due to glaucoma since about 1989. There seems to be no way to remove the pain even though they finally got the pressure down - after I lost the vision in that eye, although it is nothing like it was before they made a shunt to draw off eye fluid, since the exit area is permanently plugged for some reason. Now it aches every so often and I light up when that or the loss of hunger hits me from also having Hep C. I don't know anyone else who has Hep C but I noticed that now that I am in the level 4 area, my liver seems to ache every so often as well.

Smoking is not the only way I can get some relief for those symptoms but smoking seems to have the least side effects, disregarding the illegality of it and considering jail time. It that were not in the equation and I had a choice between a narcotic (which they didn't mind giving me hundreds of pills of that sort for over ten years to relieve pain) and just using some good weed when it hits, I'd take the weed and I was dependent on narcotics for many years in the past. THEY are addicting and when I run out it really sucks. Not so with the smoke. I just use something else until I get some more, with no physical withdrawals like I used to get from narcotics. I get a little bummed that I am out but that's about it. I also use it for insomnia, which I have suffered all my life.

I don't have the slightest idea why our American government is so adamant about not using this one drug for medical purposes. In fact, they will imprison a person for growing and smoking his or her own to stop these various pains that the doctors either can't or won't for whatever purpose - much of which is simply political or their version or morality!! Is this not totally against the idea the framers of our constitution had for all Americans and the freedoms we are supposed to be entitled to just for being born? We all need to address this more with our law makers and we need to send in letters to the opinion pages of our respective hometown newspapers. The more people knonw the truth about the medical uses for marijuana, the harder it will be for them to demonize it with the general public. Knowledge is power. Besides. who in the name of God made anyone able to dictate what another uses for pain?? Talk about arrogant and the whole Western and much of the Eastern world is the same - even the socialists and communists over there who hate America for being too successful and showing their forms of government for what they are, a complete failure, compared to a slightly modified capitalist one, as we have in America. We know, we tried both Communism and Socialism before we settled on Capitalism. It is capitalism that made this the only real power country in the world - who shares its largesse with the entire world.

However, the point is this: In some way, at some time, someone got the notion that they should decide what others put into their body, whether it effects anyone else or not. It is this type of thinking that is seeping into the American psyche and taking all the personal rights we first had when we told England where to get off. Now, the democrats are trying to reverse the Revolutionary War and to make the Bill of rights look like a few suggestions. It is that party who started this prohibitionist type thinking and now the other party feels its a good idea to take away a couple of those righrts as well, it seems. It is now, and has been for a while, time to start letting the world know that there are other ideas that we feel are correct or at least better for the people we know in the world we now live in. Total prohibition never works forever unless the idea is to start a black market for that product, as history has shown us each and every time.